Cannes Review: Carla Simón’s Romería is a Personal Tale of Intergenerational Dissonance

Continuing in the low-key register of her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns with Romería, another tale of intergenerational dissonance. A film about the stories families choose to tell and the ones they bury deep inside, it unfurls on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia) hopes to reunite with her paternal […] The post Cannes Review: Carla Simón’s Romería is a Personal Tale of Intergenerational Dissonance first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 21, 2025 - 19:35

Cannes Review: Carla Simón’s Romería is a Personal Tale of Intergenerational Dissonance

Continuing in the low-key register of her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns with Romería, another tale of intergenerational dissonance. A film about the stories families choose to tell and the ones they bury deep inside, it unfurls on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia) hopes to reunite with her paternal family. It’s also a story about displacement and yearning for lost roots, themes that cut close to the bone for a director whose parents died of AIDS when she was still a child, and who reunited with her father’s family in the town of Vigo, Galicia, where the film is set, at the same age. Simón has always been an autobiographical filmmaker; Romería might be her most personal work yet.

The story takes place over five days in 2004, with a lengthy flashback to 1983 in its second half. Marina, a budding filmmaker, is about to start college but needs her parents’ death certificates to apply for a grant. She travels to Vigo and reconnects with her uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) and, through him, other members of the family. Simón also uses her mother’s diary as a framing device, splitting Romería into chapters with quotations for each, as if uncovering her life one page at a time. In another, Simon seamlessly blends her own contemporaneous digital camera footage from the original journey––though, aside from that and the sight of a Nokia 3310, there is surprisingly little to evoke this period. The film is particularly compelling for its honesty, even allowing for flashes of sexual tension between Marina and her newfound cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín), who later appears in flashback as a stand-in for her father. Something similar is hinted at with her uncle, Iago (Alberto Gracia), who was the closest to her mother and thus the most taken by Marina’s presence, but Simón treats this potentially awkward edge of their meeting with admirable delicacy and good faith.

Through Iago, Simón finds other layers to this story, delving into the shadier aspects of Marina’s parents’ past while growing closer to them in the process. Marina discovers that they once took a boat across the Atlantic but ended up getting involved in the heroin trade, ultimately succumbing to addiction and disease. This remains a shameful memory within the family, who kept her father hidden in his room when he was sick. The story builds to a party around the midway point, where Marina and her cousins visit their grandparents in a bourgeois hillside villa, and there is a terrific moment when Marina waits to see how this distant, mythical relative will finally greet her. Garcia is wonderful in this scene, an image of barely controlled anticipation that changes in the most subtle ways. She’s wonderful again a few moments later: the young people form a line to see their grandfather, waiting as he palms each a little money. Watching and waiting for Marina’s turn, Simón allows you to share in her anxiety.

A premiere in Cannes competition is both a first for this director and relatively natural progression from her Berlinale win, though I wonder if such rarified air might act against it. Romería has scope, a clear sense of place and personal history, and the unmistakable glimmers of inner life, yet it’s aesthetically and formally modest against Cannes’ typical fare––the kind of thing that could easily slip through the cracks. Simón’s most daring swing is to take us back to her parents’ misadventures in the ’80s, with Marina standing in for her mother and Nuno for her dad; both look impossibly attractive in the shimmering sunlight, an image of young love and abandon. I can’t see it moving the needle here, but Romería‘s exploration of closure and self-discovery makes for an absorbing watch.

Romería premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Carla Simón’s Romería is a Personal Tale of Intergenerational Dissonance first appeared on The Film Stage.